Boone Hall Plantation on the way to Charleston

After a couple of nights in Savannah (and I would happily have spent longer) we headed towards Charleston. As a stopover on the way, and to get us used to the historic southern lifestyle, we visited the Boone Hall Plantation.

One thinks of these plantations as cotton plantations but actually they were usually first rice plantations, and this one was an indigo plantation. The other feature of this place is that the house, which is beautiful and very manageable as a home, is a 1935 reconstruction, fire having put paid to its predecessor.

The house was only visitable by a (rather large) guided tour, but it was a pleasant enough experience. The gardens were even nicer, on a beautiful sunny day. We were not surprised to hear they had been used more than once for period dramas.

In addition to the big house, there are nine slave houses, each housing little displays of slave life. A good way of doing this as it allowed one to go at one's own pace and stopped knots of overcrowding.

From there we put our bags into our hotel, the grand (and grandly named) Mills House Grand Wyndham Hotel. Another excellent hotel in which we were very comfortable.

That still left us with a bit of late afternoon for sightseeing so we ventured into the Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon, for a good dose of history of the Deep South.The Exchange building was completed in 1771, s this is a fine example of US Georgian architecture. Right up my street, aesthetically speaking.

 The US constitution was ratified in this room